"Only a machine is transparent and only two machines can communicate with each other in a transparent way"- Byung Chul Han, Transparenzgesellschaft

Three Machines on transparency is a project that is imagined as an “exhibition by appointment” where the artist guides the audience throughout the gallery installation. The machines represent artefacts that "do" philosophy or prototypes that materialize ideas. By demonstrating their functionality the artist synthesizes philosophical concepts into the corporeality of the physical prototypes.The principals of their construction and engineering are themselves a quest in transparency. Using shared knowledge in the form of rapid prototyping, public internet "how to" tutorials, building manuals, "tips and tricks" and shared public modular grid for designing, the process becomes open, horizontal and democratic.

On the other hand, without demonstration and information, the machines themselves remain semantically closed and unavailable. They attempt to grasp philosophical complexities trough design by producing another type of scholarship that resembles the written one."The Prison" is an observational device, "The Gaze" is a proto-lens and "The Time" vanishes into it's own transparency.

1. The Prison

This is a machine called- "The prison". It is an observational device that has one function and two processes providing heat and cold as manually controlled cycles. At the top you see an acrylic sphere covered with biodegradable thermoplastic material that changes it's transparency when heated up to 65°C thus becoming easily moldable. By cooling down slowly loses it's transparency and regains it's firmness. It is perfect for making small gears and it is used for that at the servo-controlled spray mechanism at the bottom of the machine. In this way an environment which triggers this changes in the thermoplastic is being created. Four servo controlled ice spray cans cool down to temperatures of -25 to -55°C.

heating to transparence

cooling to opaqueness

At the bottom attached to the main power cord there is a 5v adapter that powers an Arduino which controls the servos by one switch. There is a reboxed "heat gun" in the middle of the machine, 5v adapter powering a "relay" (electrically operated switch usually using an electromagnet) attached to the main power cord. After a few seconds of heating you can observe the slow process of transparency.To be exact this is called “translucency” in material terminology as the transport of light is allowed but not an image formation, so the visibility is restricted. Full transparency is impossible to a human being.Byung Chul Han claims that from a Freudian perspective, the very idea that the subject can be transparent to herself is a phantasy. Only a machine is transparent and only two machines can communicate with each other in a transparent way. The human memory is distinct from computational data storage or memory. Human memory is historical and thus constantly restructured and rewritten. Stored data, however, does not change. It is merely added to existing data and therefore more transparent than human memory.This machine is a model of “the panopticon”- a design of an institutional building (a prison) from Jeremy Bentham and allows for a single watchman to observe inmates without them knowing that they are being watched. Foucault writes in his Discipline & Punishment that prisons are complicated institutions because in one sense, they are an extension of the mechanisms of observation and examination that operate outside their walls. Contrary to the panopticon in a disciplinary society, the digital panopticon does not isolate inmates- it connects them (Chul Han).

2. The Gaze

This is more of a device then it is a machine. It is consisted of a led light that is projecting trough a glass object filled up with glycerine. Commonly a light beam does not go trough a glass bottle but it disperses. In optics the refractive index is a number that describes how light, or any other radiation, travels through that medium. The refractive index determines how much light is bent, or refracted, when entering a material.The refractive index of the glass and the glycerine is pretty similar so the light doesn’t brake, but it goes trough it. By lowering the level of the glycerin we can focus and auto-focus the beam.This is a proto-lense. The intended effect often seems to be a pre-intellectual wonder, so that you will have the same experience as a 5-year-old does.Today we don’t feel looked at, gazed at, that is why the gaze in the digital panopticon looks like freedom. It is not scary anymore- we welcome it (Chul Han).

manual focus and defocus

3. The Time

The time consists of a holder for the thermoplastic. This is how the material originally looks like.The thermoplastic balls fill up the pipe and stop at the little push mechanism- a plate that gets pushed by the Bowden cable and then releases a small number of balls trough a rubber pipe into the hot water. As before-mentioned the thermoplastic becomes transparent and moldable at the temperature of 65°C so when they fall at the bottom they vanish into their own transparency.In a few seconds the plastic balls rise to the surface and float to the edges of the glass bottle where they create a foam-like shape.Transparent time is time without past or future.

transparent time

disappearance

3d sketches

exhibition room view

Dating Prosthesis- aid for the love algorithm

Internet reflects human nature in all its imperfections while the material world of consumer products only reflect idealized notions of correct behavior.

- Dunne & Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects

Online dating has never been preciser, faster, more ubiquitous. Dating prosthesis is an attempt of telling a speculative story about the future of our romantic life aided by the possibilities of the newbody extensions in a "design fiction" manner.

How can we fill in the gaps of the “love algorithm” in our search for love? How far can we go providing information that could “prevent failure” and match us most accurately with our possible partner? While the emotional side of these processes is still very individual and works enigmatically it's greatly influenced by the social behavior and the environment of the partners. By using the measurable data in which the humans interact these objects are trying to predict the perfect match.

But how does a love algorithm work?

Normally it should match like with like but, for example, OkCupid does not only that but rates the importance of the question as in "How would you like your partner to answer" and "How important is this question to you". Then the rating of the importance of the question is turned into numbers ( irrelevant: 0, little important: 1, somewhat import: 10, very important: 50, mandatory: 250) e.g. 10 out of 11, or 50 out of 51 equals 91% satisfactory for the one person or 98% for the other one which is 94 match percentage in total.

Within the calculations the geometric mean and margin of error are taken into consideration.

According to a study from 2012 by the Association for Psychological Science the most crucial for predicting the success or failure of relationships are the communication patterns, problem-solving tendencies and sexual compatibility.

One major problem of dating applications is that they fail to collect a lot of crucial information. Because they gather data from singles who have never met, the sites have no way of knowing how two people will interact once they have been matched. Reviews of the literature on the subject reveals that aspects of relationships that emerge only after two people meet and get to know each other — exactly things like communication patterns, problem-solving tendencies and sexual compatibility — are crucial for predicting the success or failure of relationships.

Two people must initialy meet in realtime but from then on all information could be handled differently.

"The artefacts need to be grounded in how people really do behave, viewing values as raw material and shaping them into objects" (Dunne & Raby, Design Noir)

This is an analogue extension to people’s digitally enhanced needs. Wearable display tag that extends the field of precise information and enhancing the chances of the “perfect” match by displaying the “un obvious” results. Contains information with measurements of the users genitals (dimensions, shape, color).

The specific body odor plays significant role in socio-sexual behaviors. The pheromones are chemicals functioning outside of the body with a purpose to trigger a social response between the members of the same species. However, our specific body smell is disguised by our hygiene practices. In this scenario, the dating couple offer each other their own laboratory extracted pheromone to check whether it is matching.

In case your pheromone offer is not excepted you can secretly “disperse it” into the air through a pulse measuring watch that also contains a sample of your own pheromone inside. When your heart beat raises, the wrist watch emits your previously stored pheromones. It is an electronic device that enhances the person’s natural body reactions.

The daters reveal their reaction in complicated situations and their problem-solving capacity even on the first date. Reactions to situations like: stress, coping with illness, bankruptcy, mid-life crises, death of a family or friend could be tested with a simulated virtual reality crises scenario.

As an attempt of opening a debate on the situations these possible artifacts could ignite an online survey has been conducted using these exact photos as an "imagination prosthesis".

Blueprints for the fold

We are approaching ever closer to a time when artificial intelligence mimics or outperforms traits of organic intelligence. On the other hand, as humankind increases in calculation - becomes "trackable" and predictable the machine becomes poetic. This project is a transdisciplinary research at the intersection of biology, art and science, that will explore bio-technological possibilities of the human sight through a specific human extension in the form of biomimetic third eyelids.

The third eyelid , otherwise known as the nictitating membrane, is a natural feature found in most species of mammals and birds. The only species lacking one are humans and a few fellow primates. Unlike the upper and lower eyelid it moves horizontally across the eyeball and serves as protection and to moisten the eye while maintaining or increasing vision. Alternatively, humans have a specific feature, a product of evolution, called semilunar fold - a small fold of membrane at the inner corner of the eye - that was believed to be the reminant of the the third eyelid that eventually became redundant through evolution.

The idea of stretching/reconstructing this once existing third eyelid and upgrading it with a biomimetic lense will be explored in this research, narrated through speculative scenarios that aim to address socio-cultural and ethical implications. This scenario embodies cybernetic and augmented reality concepts of the future but through a somewhat inverted notion of reaching back to the biological evolutionary past.

2017-

This is a new ongoing project that started as a short "fake-scientific report" published in the publication of Julian Hespenheide called "Biotic explorers".

membranes in nature and architecture, moodboard, visual research

the Assembly

What is our perception of a robot’s entity? We know of specific contexts that form a robot’s raison d’être. “Habitats such as research laboratories and technology fairs, novels and science fiction films, production lines, and other industrial situations justify the robot’s existence by meeting the functional and aesthetic requirements defined by these specific contexts.”*

What if a new context is to be inhabited with the functional and aesthetic requirements of the assembly line? Will these robots eventually become intruders or will they fit in another raison d’être?

In an attempt to stage the output of the industrial mechanical processes in nature, the same repetitive mechanical process freezes into a still and becomes the end product itself. Industrial robots drill, coat, galvanize, sort, solder, assemble in the remote woods, on the riverside at the beach. As a method of research a generative process that employs an association list algorithm is used where possible permutations of processes, objects and actions that a "KUKA" industrial robots could perform.In this scenario the components and members of nature environments such as species of animal, plant, or other type of organisms become just parts of the industrial assembly. Trying to order, re-structure and adjust nature is a paradox that in ambiguous manner attempts to tell a cautionary tale.

Not every process in a computer is really transparent and it already starts when you type a simple letter on a keyboard.

émile uses the Baudot code- a binary 5 bit code, predecessor of ASCII and EBCDID, developed to transmit telegraph signals from one machine to another, in contrast to Morse code which was principally for human communication.

By translating the bauds (pronounced /ˈbɔːd/) rate in symbols per second in a line of code, into physical objects and “shooting” them onto physical tracks a simple computational process of binary information transmission is illustrated.

The vertical barricades invoke another kind of a structure that associates the early manual labour machines that exist somewhere between the corporeality of the printing press and the early digital computer punch card.

Contexter vs Discoursor

Contexter vs. Discoursor is a 45 min performance/anti-disciplinary research and lecture showing those who create the context, and those who create the discourse and then implement it as a disciplinary measurement.

The piece takes its references from Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, but it reflects on the institutions constituted and sustained by the people who impose critical thinking. The story unfolds in few layers trough The Curatables - a set of objects collected and shown during the performance.

excerpts from the performance at Summerhall Gallery, Captured State exhibition, Edinburgh, 2017

Dark models of need

This work consists of a set of artefacts made for performative narration. By executing an action they are reexamined as types of artefacts or plot devices as are their relations and statuses in narration.

Parafunctional design is a form of design where function is used to encourage reflection on how devices condition our behavior. In Hertzian Tales, Dune and Raby define the prefix para- as a design within the realms of utility that attempts to go beyond conventional definitions of functionalism to include the poetic.

Exploring this realm of parafunctionality, a set of behaviors typical for human obsessive–compulsive disorders is applied to everyday consumer electronics such as a water heater, a juicer and a kitchen scale. hacked kitchen appliances, Arduino Micro controller, electronic components, ureol (polyurethane) cases, acrylic paint.

Course description: On one hand, standardization is one of the defining aspects of modern life, its presence is so pervasive that it is usually taken for granted. However cumbersome, onerous, or simply puzzling certain standards may be, their fundamental purpose in streamlining procedures, regulating behaviors, and predicting results is rarely questioned. Indeed, the invisibility of infrastructure and the imperative of standardizing processes signify their absolute necessity. (Susan Leigh Star et. Al., Standards and their stories, 2009)

On the other hand, there is a big movement developing concepts of free and/or open software (F/OSS). Here we are also looking at the ways hackers sustain their productive freedom and the ideals of free speech and transparency. How are this processes connected to invisible standardizing processes?(Gabrielle Coleman, Coding Freedom,2009)

And art and design are imbued by the wish to develop something new! Instrumental for this endeavor is a believe in the possibility of free speculation. But what does this mean? (Anthony Dune, Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything, 2014)

Reading analytical essays, treatises and discussions is a precondition to find connections and paradoxes existing between these three aspects: standardization-freedom{of coding}-speculation.Specific examples from the fields of art and design will accompany the literature. The seminar will task participants to express themselves and conduct experiments in different formats of writing.

Teaching: Blueprints for the ghosts and models for the shells

Course description: The design prototype is about the process, the technological prototype is about results of research and development and the speculative prototype is about narration. Then what is the conceptual prototype about?It might be about the process of forming a new theory, or putting that theory to the test, but it is mostly about making the “impossible” connection trough synthesizing disciplines, challenging the arduous one-way process of transferring theoretical thinking into material housing. It is the ultimate interdisciplinary quest. This course explored the relationship between thinking and doing, with a goal of developing a methodology on how to transfer abstract ideas into physical models and prototypes and vice versa.